Chapter 28: The Tenements

By the time we descended from the quiet solitude of the rooftop, we looked like any other pair of grimy street urchins, with no sign that we were carrying a small fortune. Jared had buried the money pouch deep beneath a heap of refuse in a forgotten corner, and when I asked him about marking the spot, he simply tapped his temple. "It's mapped in here," he said with absolute confidence. "Better than any X on a piece of paper." His memory, honed by the necessities of his trade, was apparently as sharp as his fingers. I suggested he hide the bloody dagger as well, but he refused. He kept it with him, now wrapped in a rag and strapped securely to the inside of his leg, hidden beneath his trousers. I didn’t like it. The thing felt like a bad omen, a shard of darkness we were carrying with us.

Next, he approached a passerby, a man with a weary face and a lunch pail, and, with a few curt questions, learned that there was indeed a public well in the next district over. He even got directions. Finally. The water issue that had been tormenting me was solved. The district with the well was only a street away from the factory slum, a short walk. A single street separated the two districts, but it was like crossing a border into another country. A slightly less wretched country, at least. This district was clearly for ordinary citizens, a definite step up. The streets here were lined with tall, black-stone tenement buildings, five or six stories high, each floor a row of windows covered with ornate, Baroque-style security grilles that looked like rusted iron spiderwebs. The people here were still poor, but it was a different kind of poverty. A poverty with a roof over its head and perhaps two shirts to its name instead of one. The men and women often wore proper work clothes or simple uniforms, usually with a second layer, a waistcoat or a shawl, to ward off the city's perpetual chill. In the workers' slum, a single thin shirt was the norm, its cleanliness comparable to the one I now wore. There, they lived in tin shanties or slept on the damp ground; here, they had apartments. They were all workers, of course, but of a different sort. The factory slum housed the temporary labourers, the desperate, unskilled masses who fueled the city's great machines. This district was for the more stable working class—the foremen, the clerks, the shop assistants. Many of them likely worked in the same monstrous factories, but held slightly better, more secure positions.

I had begun to think that this entire world was mired in abject poverty, that all its people lived in a state of constant, desperate struggle. But seeing these ordinary folk, I realized there was a middle ground. They were the city's backbone, the working class I recognized from my own world's history. But they didn't seem happy. Their faces held the same weary, numb expressions as the workers next door, their eyes vacant, their shoulders slumped with the weight of their toil and the soot-filled air they breathed. Still, their lives were undeniably better. They had their own small flats, and men and women could court and form families of their own station. As we walked past the tenement buildings, I could see into the ground-floor rooms through the grimy windows: couples sharing a meager meal, a mother holding a child. I could hear the sounds of children laughing and crying from the apartments above. But looking at the cramped, squalid conditions, I doubted any of these families could afford to raise more than one or two children. A chilling thought occurred to me: Could it be that the city’s vast population of orphans and child labourers came from places like this? Were these the children who couldn't be fed, who were cast out onto the streets to fend for themselves or be swallowed by the factories?

The apartments themselves were shockingly small. Most of the ground-floor flats I saw were just one or two rooms, with tiny living spaces. Many had the kitchen integrated directly into the main room—a single stove and a sink against one wall, what a modern estate agent in my old world might euphemistically, and cruelly, call an "open-plan kitchen." I doubted any of these flats had their own private bathrooms or privies; the evidence was the sheer number of public latrines dotted around the district, each with its own cloud of flies and foul stench. That also explained the well. These were cheap tenements, built for the masses, and it was likely that many of the floors had no running water at all.

As we walked, our conversation muted by the sheer weariness of it all, we came across a group of peelers. They had cordoned off a dark, narrow alleyway between two tenements and were conducting some sort of investigation. A small crowd of onlookers had gathered, their faces a mixture of fear and morbid curiosity, whispering amongst themselves. We thought at first it might be related to the factory owner's murder, that they were widening their search. We cautiously approached and asked a bystander what had happened. He was a stooped man with a cloth cap, and he didn't even look at us as he spoke. "A girl," he mumbled, his eyes fixed on the alley. "Found her not an hour ago. Murdered."

A cold dread washed over me, colder than any fever chill. I remembered the scream from last night, the sound of pure terror cutting through the darkness, then a sudden, horrible silence. It wasn't a coincidence. The scream had found its victim.